eggbophttp://www.eggbop.com/
: on things koreanenCopyright 2008Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:05:46 -0500http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssA Book, a Movie and Korean MothersThe Commoner by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. It was a quick read, in two late night sittings, the kind that kept me up when I really should have been sleeping so I wouldn’t be grumpy and snappish all the next day. But I get starved for literature and I’d heard about the book on a random radio station where the author was being interviewed. It’s a fictionalized account of the first non-royal Japanese girl to marry into the Imperial family of Japan, Empress Michiko.
I was especially drawn to the rare opportunity to imagine life inside those palace walls where the Emperor until Japan’s defeat by the Americans in WWII was considered a god. Not “as” a god, but actually a god whom you could not look at directly like the sun. When the Americans defeated Japan, they forced the emperor to announce over the radio his humanity, and published widely photos of the Japanese emperor in everyday clothes while standing next to the much taller (therefore superior) American general. It was also known that the Imperial family spoke an archaic form of royal Japanese, such that if left on the streets, the prince would not know the names of some ordinary objects. Intriguing, no?
But I bet if you took a moment you could guess what the book would be about ultimately, especially if you knew the author was a white American guy (who’d spent a good number of years in Japan in his youth)... It’d be about a woman who loses herself, to the point of near destruction, because of a culture that valued the good of the group (in this case, Japan) over the individual.
The novel in general had technical issues, the rhythm/pacing/narrative believability – all solidly average – but the sticking point for me was the almost foregone conclusion that a woman in Japanese culture would be destroyed by putting the needs of a group before her own. Very Western, very individualistic point of view.
And it reminds me of the time when I discovered the truly great Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo (the first real contemporary Korean auteur in my opinion) in a New York Film Festival screening of Woman is the Future of Man. During the Q + A afterward, a very angry white woman stood up shaking while asking Mr. Hong whether a feminist revolution was not long overdue. She asked this because this like most of his films explored sexuality in contemporary Korean society without apologizing for it – including a scene where a woman is raped by her former boyfriend and her current boyfriend has sex with her to “clean” her. Excruciating subject matter to present without judgment but that’s what the filmmaker does. And it leaves the viewer with an unflinching look at Korean relationships, the dynamics,and the nature of it’s attraction.
Which finally brings me to my point: While I agree with most everything that can go wrong with denying oneself for the sake of the group, westerners have never really learned what Asians know – that there is also great pleasure and abundance in living one’s life for the good of the group. Korean mothers are especially gifted at this because even in what should be the most oppressive Confucian society like ours, it is mostly driven I believe, by its mothers. Mothers who I swear love better than all other mothers, because it is boundless (and therefore crazy-making in many cases) and yes, it is selfless. It is, or can be, much like the Buddhist way of finding oneself by losing oneself, or like the Christian understanding of dying to oneself to save yourself.
Westerners have a hard time with this for obvious reasons, and it is at the heart of what ails our society I believe, why families fall apart so easily, why marriage is devalued, why women are so much at war with themselves and their men so often lost. And not to say Koreans or Asian cultures don’t experience these things as well but they are experienced differently, and to a lesser degree.
In the movie there is another stunning one minute scene where out of nowhere, almost incidentally, the main character goes to a play. We see the audience then the stage where a mother starves trying to keep her son fed during war times, and all we hear is a piercing wail: "Ommmmaaa!" And in that minute we understand almost everything Koreans feel about their mothers and what Korean mothers do for their children. That is, they give away everything, and so become everything. And that is what should have been the starting point of Mr. Burnham's book.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/03/a-book-a-movie-and-korean-moth.htmlfilmThu, 27 Mar 2008 21:05:46 -0500white rice
soft brown rice
pressed barley
wheat bulghur
thai royal purple sticky wild rices (small handful)
american wild rice (small handful)
throw a handful in your rice cooker and voila, whole grain meals!
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/03/white-rice-1.htmlrecipesThu, 20 Mar 2008 22:36:10 -0500Closed EyesMy Mom is in Korea right now, visiting my brother in Seoul. Every time she goes, it reminds me of an earlier trip years ago when she hadn’t been back since emigrating in 1973, right after I was born. Our phone call on her return:
Me: Omma! Welcome back! How was it?
Mom: (pause) You know what? Too many Korean people.
Me: Um, huh?
Mom: Yeah. Too many Korean people everywhere. I miss United State. So when I tire look at all the Korean people I close my eye and pretend they are the black people.
Me: HUH?
Mom: Yeah. On the bus. I close eyes.
Me: (laughing of course) But did you have fun?!
Mom: Oh yeah. Korea is amazing. Everybody rich!http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/03/closed-eyes-1.html
http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/03/closed-eyes-1.htmlstoriesFri, 07 Mar 2008 22:21:14 -0500Blink.here. She is a very talented artist with an amazing graphic novel in the works, the first Korean-American graphic novel ever. Or so I say. She’s also obsessed with Korean related things and I particularly love the old archival photos of Korean-Americans she digs up at the LA library like this one:

And for those mom readers out there I'd welcome any time management advice you have!
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/03/blink.htmlThu, 06 Mar 2008 21:57:10 -0500Everyday Korean Cooking
Out of the twelve or so Korean cookbooks I've collected over the years my favorite so far has been Everyday Korean Cooking. When it was in print it was $12 but now the cheapest copy I could find was $50! In any case, I love that it is homemade looking, with a basic wire binder that they'll do for you at Kinko's and a font that reminds me of the early days when you had about two choices on your home computer.
I learned most of my basic dishes from this book and as I got used to making them I'd add ingredients and techniques from other cookbooks. (I find the nationalism and OCD aspects of Koreans come out when writing cookbooks because the recipes can get very long with almost arcane techniques and discussion such as one recipe which mourned the use of metal knives to cut vegetables when historically it was considered a kind of profanity, you ought to tear vegetables by hand.)
Here is a simple recipe for shigumchi, kongnamul, or soochoo namul:
1 bunch of spinach/ 1 bag of sprouts (pre-washed spinach will save you heartache)
3-4 diced scallions
2-3 minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon sugar
salt, pepper
soy sauce
sesame oil
sesame seeds (not essential but close)
1 teaspoon vinegar (again, not essential especially if you want to keep the banchan around for longer than two days, the vinegar quickly overripens the vegetables)
Directions:
1. Boil water in a medium sized pot.
2. When boiling, lower heat to high simmer, then blanch batches of vegetables for at least 20 seconds until wilted. (Blanching=dipping in hot water then removing) Vegetables should wilt but be slightly crunchy.
3. Drain and squeeze blanched vegetables. (Your armful of spinach will now fit in your hand)
4. Throw in garlic, scallion, and seeds (sesame seeds can be toasted) until it looks good to your eye. Taste.
5. Pour a bit of sesame oil in your hand and rub into vegetables. Taste.
6. Pour a bit of soy sauce in your hand and do the same.
7. Add sugar.
8. Add vinegar.
Mix and serve chilled if desired.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/everyday-korean-cooking.htmlrecipesThu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:25 -0500Heaven Sent
28 E. 18th, betw. Broadway and Park Ave. South.]]>http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/heaven-sent.html
http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/heaven-sent.htmlrestaurantsSun, 17 Feb 2008 22:17:26 -0500Dokkaebi...They are driving me nuts.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/dokkaebi.htmlFri, 15 Feb 2008 09:44:47 -0500Legacythis – Barack Obama’s speech to a Christian social action group called the Sojourners. He was speaking on christianity and religion as it related to politics. His message was so simple and yet profound it almost knocked me off my feet and made me realize how jaded I had really become. And how much I could be doing in the world for good. And how much my past ties me to the desperate needs in the world right now. And in a sudden moment of clarity, I see that this is how my past becomes the future, it’s how I understand it in order to live right now.
Happy Valentine's Day.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/legacy.htmlThu, 14 Feb 2008 11:33:38 -0500Jeong Mee Yoon
A link to her online portfolio is here.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/jeong-mee-yoon-1.htmlartistsThu, 07 Feb 2008 20:20:57 -0500Warning: I am actually going to discuss the Meta. Of. Kimchee.
I get in these eating moods where all I seem to do is look for kimchee substitutions, especially when I don’t have any at home. Everything gets covered in some kind of hot sauce: falafels, tacos, vietnamese pork chops, scrambled eggs... and the best is of course when that hot sauce is also vinegary like salsa, or vietnamese sriracha sauce which is already vinegary but WITH the little pickled carrots and daikon can almost make you forget you were really needing some kimchee. I know every Korean has eaten his share of ramen with pickles so apparently that extra salt-vinegar-pickle crunch on top of salty savory broth can also hit the spot.
But what is it exactly about kimchee that so defines our cuisine? Why do we have to have it, crave it, and so, are cursed by it?
I read once in some online dissertation that Korean food had six flavors unlike other cuisines which normally have five. Salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter – and pungent. This writer included kimchee as pungent before spicy which of course it is also. In any case, he didn’t really address why or what it meant – just that acquiring this sixth flavor was difficult but transformative once you got it.
My take on this is from a cook’s perspective.
Cooking is a primal kind of alchemy. You hunt, you gather, and add fire to transform flesh and field into flavor, into nutrition, and render something that was once out there either as blood and muscle or soil and sun, into an intimate experience which you take into yourself. (This is why food and sex in my opinion go hand in hand and why smoking, the element of fire, is also a natural factor. But I digress.)
At the core of this alchemy is the idea of change, of transformation and, now bear with me, the experience of eating Korean food is predicated on this idea. Where western food is meant to be experienced finally and separately - such as the lovely steak with it’s separate side dishes none of which are meant per se to be eaten in the same bite – Korean food is all about shifting flavor and hence, shifting experience. You start with a clean palate, a base of pure white carbohydrate and go through a wonderful choreography of choosing banchan, and no two bites are the same.
Now enter kimchee.
That mouthful of warm sticky rice plus beef and bit of shigumchi (spinach) you’re chewing and enjoying, chewing and swallowing then bam! in comes a fireball of salt/sweet/fiery crunch and - a sudden crescendo - the rice, beef and spinach are again transformed. How complicated is that?
And as if it weren’t enough to have all this, Koreans add still more to the table – the elements of energy which changes the food even more and right before your eyes. I’m talking about the stew that arrives boiling, or the bibimbop that crackles in it’s stone bowl, the cold soups with chunks of ice floating among the cucumber and pear.
Which is why those who do not get Korean food are so hard to watch. They sit at the feast, picking singly at a strand of bean sprout before washing it down with water, or dig into their meal of white rice and bulgogi without even a glance at the symphony around them. And forget kimchee, the smell alone offendeth.
The musical element to eating I think is no accident. For every banchan you add to the table a whole new note is added, and the orchestration of your meal becomes that much more enriched. But the point is kimchee, that final beat which brings it all home. It marries the flavors and instead of ending your mouthful of experience in a quiet fade, it brings it up and loud. It’s the punctuation to our score, the last beat in each measure – without which the experience is chaotic and unorganized, lacking structure and meaning, a string of notes that sound okay but has no beat.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/warning-i-am-actually-going-to-1.htmlThu, 07 Feb 2008 10:09:20 -0500Kobong
In her book Things Korean, O-Young Lee writes about a traditional measuring cup called the kobong. Used to measure grain, especially rice which was a main form of currency for much of Korean history, she writes:

“Kobong is a concept which has no one-word equivalent in other languages... It means heaping the measuring cup till it overflows, and even then some.
... To provide a some idea of how high it is heaped, a dishonest measure in Korea is one where the grain is heaped to overflowing only twice, not three or four times. If it is not absolutely spilling over, that is being pretty stingy.” p.14

In other words, the kobong was not a measure of scientific accuracy, but of inaccuracy. And it’s importance was not so much the grain itself but what it meant relationally.
I love this because Koreans aren’t anything if not relationship oriented. And I love that once, in our highly ordered Confucian culture, even the smallest objects had a place and it’s purpose too was relational.
On the flip side, I think this is what was especially hard for Korean immigrants to the US. To come from the highly ordered to the un-ordered, and because meaning itself was found in the order, for many, meaning itself was destroyed.
I am thinking of someone, of course, as I write this. An uncle here, another there but in general of all the Korean men who moved here and found themselves as grocers and dry cleaners and janitors despite their educations and degrees, and slowly lost themselves to their invisible places as non-Americans. For them, I wish kobong.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/02/kobong.htmlbooksSat, 02 Feb 2008 15:37:45 -0500Super Easy Oxtail Soup (Gori or Kori Tang)Ingredients:
Oxtail (found in the beef section of your grocery store)
Water
5-8 garlic cloves
1-2 onions
Med. Korean betchoo or 2-3 American turnips
Salt and Pepper to taste
Scallion for garnish
The Recipe:
For a full stock pot, use about seven or as many pieces of oxtail as will fit comfortable on the bottom. (For 2/3 of a stock pot of soup, use about five big pieces.)
Fill with water as discussed above.
Add 5-8 garlic cloves, 1-2 sliced onions.
Bring to boil, then simmer on the lowest simmer setting for at least an hour.
Remove oxtail and when cool, nudge off the meat and add back to the soup. (My mom always set aside some of the meat and would urge us kids into the kitchen to eat it while it was still hot. Sprinkled with salt and sometimes soy sauce, the meat would disappear in minutes!)
Add peeled and cubed betchoo (turnip).
Salt and pepper liberally to taste.
Return to simmer for about twenty minutes or however soft you like your turnip.
Eat as much as you want or remove as much as you want for eating before the next step.
...Add bones (probably without the small knob bits that fall off each oxtail piece) back to the soup and simmer again for about two or so hours until the bones release their marrow.
Soup will be milky white.
Garnish with scallion if you prefer.
(For a non-fat version, simply place soup after initial simmer in the refrigerator overnight and skim off hardened fat in the morning.)
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/01/super-easy-oxtail-soup-kori-ta.htmlrecipesTue, 29 Jan 2008 12:33:20 -0500The Elephant of Kimchee
Among all the many loving discussions about the wonderful unique taste of kimchee, of it’s health benefits, it’s history, it’s many forms – I’ve never heard discussed the one thing about kimchee that makes it truly fantastic. It’s the one thing that differentiates your kimchee from my kimchee, no matter how equal our ingredients – That is, your Choom. SALIVA. Yours, your mom’s, your siblings, your roommate’s all add that truly unique ingredient, the actual stuff of fermentation that gives the kimchee it’s flavor.
Now, of course, the little shrimp or oyster used in the kimchee begins the process but as anyone who finishes the smaller serving of kimchee kept in tupperware and goes back to original giant jar for more – finds the original kimchee much less fermented, less ‘ripened’ as we’d say. Now take that same kimchee and track it’s distribution to different households and I daresay it tastes different in each home. (In my previous life without kids I’d love to try this experiment but will throw my hypothesis out there for anyone else to try!)
I guess it’s the gross-out factor that prevents much talk about this say over dinner while you’re actually eating it. (Yumm, your friend so-and-so really added something new to the kimchee..) But let me take a moment to parse out the gross bits and make an inquiry into the science of fermention...
The enzymes from your saliva act in the same way as the shrimp/oyster and foster the ripening of the kimchee from a stiff plain cabbage dressed with dried korean chiles and salt to a rich leafy cabbage, absorbed with the flavors of chile, salt and sugar. The salt forces the water out of the cabbage, the enzymes from the shrimp break down the cabbage cells, and the seasoning takes on the sharp piquant, almost vinegary flavor that defines korean kimchee. The enzymes from your saliva hasten this process in degrees, basically as much as you take the kimchee out of the fridge and eat some, and you get to experience the wonder of eating kimchee in many stages, culminating in hopefully a kick-ass stew, made best only with the most fermented, most enzyme-filled kimchee around. (Or as my sister says, leave that kimchee in the fridge until it becomes jigae all by itself!)
Enzymes, anyone?
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/01/the-elephant-of-kimchee-1.htmlTue, 29 Jan 2008 10:27:20 -0500Tyleno
In the early nineties, my mother owned a small grocery store in Philadelphia, in a small strip mall with a Dollar Store on one end. My younger brother, sister and I worked there regularly.
A classic scene:
Customer: How much for the Tylenol?
(Brother takes it off the shelf behind him, dusts off the cap.)
Brother: Eight ninety-nine. No tax.
Customer: EIGHT NINETY-NINE! Yo I can get that from the dollar store for ninety-nine cent! You crazy?
(Sensing trouble brewing)
Brother: NINETY-NINE CENT? Yo you better read the label – that’s TYLE-NO not TYLENOL! That shit’s TYLE-NO!
Customer cracks up. Pays. Leaves.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/01/tyleno-1.htmlSat, 19 Jan 2008 21:23:19 -0500The Tempting TrioCho Dang Gol, a restaurant specializing in tofu dishes - the freshest, richest, homemade tofu turned into the most delicious biji's and soon-doobu's you've ever had. My favorite is the kimchee biji - mouthfuls of rich, almost velvety homemade doobu simmered in garlic, onion and pork, punctuated perfectly by chunks of braised kimchee that become almost silken as you spoon your way down the bowl into the milky tofu broth. Besides this, I've only ever had their bibimbop and though it was top-notch, it was very pricey when you can get more for less right next door at my all-time favorite KTown restaurant…
which is Han Bat. Their food is reliably and consistently fresh, delicious and authentic. It is by far the most reasonably priced, the portions generous, and the restaurant itself is warm and inviting, probably because of the great steaming vats of sullong-tang they have simmering at the rear of the restaurant. (The vats simmer around the clock in a "traditional" Korean cooking hearth, complete with a small thatched roof overhead so customers might feel as if they were sitting in the yard of a traditional home.) Try the deliciously hot and crispy seafood pajun or kimchee binde-dduk, bibimbop, any of the jigae's, gooks, and tangs - you will inevitably get a side of steaming fresh sollung-tang to boot.
And last but not least, the Korean Chinese Restaurant whose name I can never remember, sandwiched between the two above restaurants makes wonderful ja jang myun. The deep rich ja jang sauce is full of onion and pork bits and their homemade noodles are nicely chewy and doughy and all of it is only exponentially enhanced when accompanied by a platter of their excellent tang soo yuk. So tangy, so-sweet-and-yet-so-sour with just the right amount of pineapple to onion to green pepper ratio and a heaping family sized portion of fried pork… (And the prices are good too which for a Korean is an important as anything!)
More favorites to come. In the meantime, check out Trifood.com where they try to compile a list of all the Korean restaurants in NY, NJ and CT.
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http://www.eggbop.com/archive/2008/01/the-tempting-trio.htmlrestaurantsMon, 14 Jan 2008 22:45:49 -0500